Terror at tail end of trans-Pacific flight

The remains of a Boeing 777 sits on the tarmac in San Francisco. The Asiana Airlines Flight 214 from Seoul, South Korea crashed while landing on Saturday, July 6. Passengers were forced to jump to safety.
— Associated Press

The remains of a Boeing 777 sits on the tarmac in San Francisco. The Asiana Airlines Flight 214 from Seoul, South Korea crashed while landing on Saturday, July 6. Passengers were forced to jump to safety.
/ Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO  After nearly 11 hours in the air, the passengers and crew aboard a jumbo jetliner traveling from Seoul to San Francisco were looking forward to a quick and uneventful landing as Asiana Airlines Flight 214 approached the airport from over San Francisco Bay. What they got instead, without a word of warning, was terror, panic and confusion.

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The Boeing 777 slammed into the runway on Saturday morning, breaking off its tail and catching fire before slumping to a stop that allowed the lucky ones to flee down emergency slides into thick smoke and a trail of debris. Firefighters doused the flames that burned through the fuselage with foam and water, and police officers on the ground threw utility knives up to crew members so they could cut the seat belts of those who remained trapped as rescue crews removed the injured.

By the time the 307 people on the flight all were accounted for several hours later, two Chinese teenage girls found outside wreckage had been confirmed dead and 182 transported to area hospitals. But as harrowing as the crash was, survivors and witnesses were just as stunned to learn that the toll of deaths and serious injuries wasn't much higher.

"When you heard that explosion, that loud boom and you saw the black smoke...you just thought, my god, everybody in there is gone," said Ki Siadatan, who lives a few miles away from San Francisco International Airport and watched the plane's "wobbly" and "a little bit out of control" approach from his balcony. "My initial reaction was I don't see how anyone could have made it."

Vedpal Singh, who was sitting in the middle of the aircraft and survived the crash with his family, said there was no forewarning from the pilot or any crew members before the plane touched down hard and he heard a loud sound.

"We knew something was horrible wrong," said Singh, who suffered a fractured collarbone and had his arm was in a sling.

"It's miraculous we survived," he said.

A visibly shaken Singh said the plane went silent before people tried to get out anyway they could. His 15-year-old son said luggage tumbled from the overhead bins. The entire incident lasted about 10 seconds.

Another passenger, Benjamin Levy, 39, said it looked to him that the plane was flying too low and too close to the bay as it approached the runway. Levy, who was sitting in an emergency exit row, said he felt the pilot try to lift the jet up before it crashed, and thinks the maneuver might have saved some lives.

"Everybody was screaming. I was trying to usher them out," he recalled of the first seconds after the landing. "I said, `Stay calm, stop screaming, help each other out, don't push.'"

San Francisco Fire Department Chief Joanne Hayes-White said the two who died were found on "the exterior" of the plane. "Having surveyed that area, we're lucky that there hasn't been a greater loss," she said.